A Dim Flicker

On Jesi Bender’s ‘Child of Light’

Claude Monet, The Artist’s Family in the Garden, 1875, Oil on canvas

“Was it not French? Was it not gibberish? Was it not innocent prophecy?”

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, “and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Child of Light, a novel written by the artist, poet, and playwright Jesi Bender, has certainly received its fair share of love. One reviewer likens the prose to Nabokov’s and calls one passage in particular as “concise and devastating an illustration of inherited trauma as you’re ever likely to see in print.” A cursory glance at most commercial reviews suggests this genre-bending literary novel — about science and spiritualism in the Gilded Age, and one privileged family’s toxic dynamics — is well worthy of love, praise, and attention.

At its core, Child of Light is about Ambrétte Memenon, a 13-year-old French immigrant whose ailing spiritualist mother, Maman, and taciturn scientist father, Papa, are both obsessed, in equal measure, with being anywhere but their unhappy household. There is also the brother, born Modeste but later referred to as Georges, representing the grotesque mutation of a privileged boy into a violent man.

The Memenons have recently arrived in Utica, New York, where they live in one of the few homes powered by electricity. Electricity is a primary surface-level theme of the novel, for Papa has worked with Nikola Tesla and Lucien Gaulard, one of the forefathers of the modern transformer. Various sections of the book are written in a historical style detailing Gaulard and Papa’s workaholic exploits, but the more intriguing energy coursing through Child of Light comes from Maman, a devout spiritualist slowly dying of a mysterious illness, who tells Ambrétte that spirits never die, for “the dead are near us at all times. . . . Some people can read what the spirits share. You had that gift as a child.”

So begins the tale of Ambrétte’s experimental coming-of-age story, as our young protagonist struggles to make sense of the world and her parents’ abstruse dealings. Child of Light strays away from a traditional plot-driven narrative through shape-shifting chapters chock-full of multilingual passages, esoteric spiritualist texts, fables and short stories, historical fiction sections, a few instances of sheet music, and enough wordplay to make Gertrude Stein proud.

When it comes to literary fiction, however, linguistic complexity isn’t synonymous with merit, and while Ambrétte’s use of anagrams is refreshingly naive, it’s rarely enlightening — more dimly flickering than genuinely illuminating. The overall effect is an ambitious pastiche that, while admirable in its scope, falls short of the brilliance Papa and his scientist friends hope to capture.

“Je ne te pardonne pas. Tu comprends?

[I no you pardon no. You comprehend?]”

There is a lot of partially translated French in Child of Light, alluding to Ambrétte’s partial knowledge of French. A generous reading of the stylistic choice to only translate certain passages acknowledges the nebulous contours of language and complexity of intrafamily communication itself. But readers who don’t read French would be wise to have a dictionary on hand — for the record, this reviewer lives in France and speaks French fluently — because many translations are simply impossible to make sense of unless you speak much better than Ambrétte: “Non. Georges et moi irons encore chercher du bois pour les cercueils. [No. Georges and me … … … … … more of … … for the ….the................]”

Much like the pubescent anagrammatic wordplay, the fragmented translation approach is a clever but ultimately ineffective means for moving the plot forward or revealing character, more of a structuralist mind game than an effective literary device.

“How strange to contemplate these lives that existed outside the Memenon walls. Multitudes upon multitudes, stranger still. Like leaves on the trees. Branches in the wind.”

There is a rare moment in Child of Light that considers the lives beyond the Memenon family’s walls. Quotes like the one above betray a certain flatness at the novel’s core, an ignorance of the world beyond the novel’s central, white middle-class characters. This is not an issue in and of itself, as the book is heavily focused on Ambrétte’s interpretation of the world, but given that the book’s publisher, Whiskey Tit, is — according to its mission statement — interested in “devious, melancholy, devastating, experimental, smart, playful, and/or wild” writing, with particular attention to uplifting “POC and LGBTQ+ individuals, poor and working class people, and other underrepresented groups,” the novel’s inclusive aspirations miss the mark. While Child of Light certainly checks the publisher’s stylistic boxes, none of these aforesaid subjects feature much in the novel, but are rather paid lip service to in a way that sometimes smacks of a writer merely covering her bases in the zeitgeist.

Given that Ambrétte’s best friend is Celeste, a poor orphan, it is striking how few pages are devoted to Celeste’s personhood, psychology, or life within the orphanage. For all of Ambrétte’s wishes to be better friends with Celeste, having a poor friend is not the same as giving the working class a voice. Instead, Celeste functions as a vehicle to displace Ambrétte’s guilt, and when Maman bans Ambrétte from seeing Celeste because of her lower station, Ambrétte abides. In a particularly telling moment, which seems to capture the privileged guilt that hums beneath the book’s pages, Ambrétte tells Celeste, “I can’t live with the idea of you hating me.”

Poor Celeste’s actual humanity remains a mystery throughout the novel, as does the humanity of other “underrepresented groups.” In the Memenon household, Italians are consistently denigrated as working-class parasites; as for other minorities, the terms “negro” and “negress” show up exactly six times in Child of Light, most notably when Ambrétte hears her mother speaking:

Maman was angrily talking about the Irish and the Negroes, “which means plaçages and bastards” (Ambrétte recognized the latter but not the former). But, worst of all were “all the Italians up here,” how loud and uninhibited they were, pedestrian, prosaic. To Maman, those were the ultimate insults. Pedestrian. Prosaic. Italian.

In and of itself, there’s no problem in quoting a bigoted character speaking in 1896, but context is important and reflection essential, and referring to the bigotry of yore isn’t the same thing as giving voice to the oppressed. That there are no characters in the novel whose skin is darker than an incandescent lightbulb is a missed opportunity at best and a glaring blind spot at worst, both for the narrative and the publisher whose mission statement is uplifting underrepresented voices (and you can guess the pigmentary hue of the vast majority of authors on Whiskey Tit’s roster).

Similarly, regarding the actual representation of LGBTQ+ individuals, whatever Maman’s potentially gay relationship is with Lizzy, the nursemaid, all of it happens behind closed doors. Maman and Lizzy’s relationship is forever kept at arm’s length throughout the narrative, perhaps to convey the impossibility of ever really knowing what goes on out of view. But not delving into the relationship between a female spiritualist and her younger nurse feels like a missed opportunity in a novel intent on subverting mainstream narratives. Like Maman’s spiritualist obsession with communicating with “the other side,” deeper literary investigations about her relationship with Lizzy — and Ambrétte’s burgeoning sexuality, for that matter — remain elusive.

“While she had no agricultural experience, she did know that bulls are more violent and unpredictable, unlike their female counterparts, whose lives oscillate between boredom and complacency.”

And then there’s the ever-present critique of chauvinist patriarchy and its effect on domesticated women. Not all men — but always a man. Yes, the patriarchal heteronormative world is a shitty one — we get it — but if fiction can help transcend the patriarchal boundaries that have for so long enclosed the breadth of the human experience, the oppressor as well as the oppressed must be offered the opportunity for redemption. To reduce antagonists to gendered, monstrous caricatures is to uphold the very myths that literature is intended to destroy — namely, that we are, all of us, human first and foremost; that gender, like sexuality, is largely a social construct; and that in the spirit world, we are all more alike than we think.

The more a villain is humanized in a story, the more they can be held to account for their inhumanity, but Child of Light’s two male characters are one-dimensional caricatures that represent all that is wrong with contemporary tropes about masculinity: the father, a sexist workaholic who doesn’t speak his daughter’s language and subjugates Maman in increasingly brutal ways, and the brother, a boyish buffoon who used to be called Modeste but is now called Georges because he wants to be a man, a transformation that leads him to commit an unspeakable atrocity, which he dismisses at book’s end with, “I was a young boy and young boys can be … Rabelaisian. Ribald. Indelicate.”

The main source of trauma in Child of Light is patriarchal society writ large: the cold, terse father, the sexist, brutish brother, and the domesticated mother who believes women are only good for bearing children. All of this only serves to caricaturize the very real and pressing nature of contemporary patriarchal toxicity and capitalistic chauvinism, falsifying a deeper investigation into the structures that limit gender equality and equity in a predictable way.

Instead of illuminating Ambrétte’s ability to remain human in an inhuman, chauvinist system, Ambrétte, like her mother, and like the orphan Celeste, ultimately succumbs to the patriarchal world without much of a fight. The feminine spirit in Child of Light is simultaneously mystified and infantilized throughout, but only in the context of female characters. Male characters are simply essentialized and demonized as aggressors, leaving little hope for anyone, let alone humanity as a whole, to transcend the gendered, ethnic, and economic categorizations that continue to plague much of the patriarchal world today.

In fiction, once characters are dehumanized, there’s little hope for evolution or humanity, and throughout Child of Light, the caricatures loom heavy: the orphan, the chauvinist, “the Italians,” “the negroes,” the mental patient, the patriarch, the little girl who just wants to please her mother. All of this potential humanity is relegated to categories that, while certainly of the 19^th century (and still today), are not the be-all and end-all of the human experience. The reader is cheated of a deeper understanding of Maman, Papa, Ambrétte, and Georges — not how they became who they are, but why the world is so intent on caricaturizing human beings in the first place.

Ambrétte’s character is ultimately tragic because the women in Child of Light are necessarily tragic characters, forced to submit to a world where men are obsessed with their own brilliance, forever keeping women in the shadows through sexism, violence, and the institution of marriage. At the novel’s end, Ambrétte reaches a disheartening conclusion: “She could refuse to live as the punished. She was as free as a little bird in her nest.” But Ambrétte is not free. For a bird to be free, it must relinquish the need for the nest. Lines like this belie the discomfiting and prevailing assumption of the novel: that however bad things can get, privileged middle-class comfort is still preferable to life “on the other side” — of town, that is — leaving the reader to imagine what lives characters like Lizzy and Celeste might have lived outside of the Memenons’ privileged walls.

Like the electricity that hums throughout the historical fiction sections in Child of Light, there is great potential in the novel — sparks often found in the polished prose, polyglot experimentation, and compelling history of spiritualism — but the connection falters. Child of Light is an ambitious novel, and its author should be applauded, but this tale about a supposedly innocent white girl in a big bad patriarchal world misses important opportunities to investigate deeper questions about whiteness, privilege, “the other side” of town, and what it means to be happy in a privileged family — father, brother, mother, and daughter included.

Samuél Lopez-Barrantes has lived in Paris since 2010 as a novelist, musician, and literary tour guide. He holds an MA in social theory (UCL) and an MFA in creative writing (VCFA). He is a member of the pop/americana band Slim and The Beast, is fiction editor at SOUVENIR Magazine, and is the co-founder of Kingdom Anywhere, an independent anglophone publisher in Paris. His latest novel, The Requisitions, is a historical metafiction set during the Nazi occupation of Poland about how to remain human during inhumane times. Find out more: ifnotparis.substack.com.